Pinyin

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard

by David Moser
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading
the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable
question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine.
When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's
Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years
the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated
Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So
what do I mean by "hard"? Since I know at the outset that the
whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining
and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what
I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying
to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with
the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the
whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me -- and, of course,
for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives
bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.

If this were as far as I went, my statement would be a pretty
empty one. Of course Chinese is hard for me. After all,
any foreign language is hard for a non-native, right? Well,
sort of. Not all foreign languages are equally difficult for any
learner. It depends on which language you're coming from. A French
person can usually learn Italian faster than an American, and an
average American could probably master German a lot faster than an
average Japanese, and so on. So part of what I'm contending is
that Chinese is hard compared to ... well, compared to almost any
other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that
Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also
hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for
them, for Chinese people.1

If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most
Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is
hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in
the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the
most unlivable city in America.) Maybe all Chinese people deserve
a medal just for being born Chinese. At any rate, they generally
become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their
native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on
the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up
the steep slopes.

Everyone's heard the supposed fact that if you take the English
idiom "It's Greek to me" and search for equivalent idioms in all
the world's languages to arrive at a consensus as to which
language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey
is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible
language. (For example, the French have the expression "C'est
du chinois", "It's Chinese", i.e., "It's incomprehensible".
Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question
arises: What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an
impossibly hard language? You then look for the corresponding
phrase in Chinese, and you find Gēn
tiānshū yíyàng跟天书一样
meaning "It's like heavenly script."

There is truth in this linguistic yarn; Chinese does deserve
its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake
to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of
it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to
effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely
because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be
disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single
person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks
themselves "Why in the world am I doing this?" Those who can still
remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then
and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle.
Those who merely say "I've come this far -- I can't stop now" will
have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of
mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that
it takes.

Okay, having explained a bit of what I mean by the word, I
return to my original question: Why is Chinese so damn
hard?

1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.

Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. I, like many
students of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the
writing system, which is surely one of the most fascinating
scripts in the world. The more you learn about Chinese characters
the more intriguing and addicting they become. The study of
Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon
find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop
by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt to
hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.

The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but as the
Chinese people began to realize the importance of universal
literacy, it became clear that these
ideograms were
sort of like bound feet -- some fetishists may have liked the way
they looked, but they weren't too practical for daily use.

For one thing, it is simply unreasonably hard to learn enough
characters to become functionally literate. Again, someone may ask
"Hard in comparison to what?" And the answer is easy: Hard in
comparison to Spanish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, or any other sane,
"normal" language that requires at most a few dozen symbols to
write anything in the language. John DeFrancis, in his book
The Chinese Language:
Fact and Fantasy, reports that his Chinese colleagues
estimate it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to
learn to read and write three thousand characters, whereas his
French and Spanish colleagues estimate that students in their
respective countries achieve comparable levels in half that
time.2 Naturally, this estimate is rather crude
and impressionistic (it's unclear what "comparable levels"
means here), but the overall implications are obvious: the
Chinese writing system is harder to learn, in absolute terms,
than an alphabetic writing system.3 Even Chinese kids, whose minds are at their
peak absorptive power, have more trouble with Chinese
characters than their little counterparts in other countries
have with their respective scripts. Just imagine the
difficulties experienced by relatively sluggish post-pubescent
foreign learners such as myself.

Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge
number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely
true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay
this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese
has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters
you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock.
I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000
characters under my belt. I often had to look up several
characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the
meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is
meant by "read" in this context is "read and basically comprehend
the text without having to look up dozens of characters";
otherwise the claim is rather empty.)

This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when
you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters
in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common
ones.4 But what such accounts don't tell you is
that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of
those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note
that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't
mean you know the word "uptight".) Plus, as anyone who has
studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with
every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the
meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of
knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those
words combine with other words in a multitude of different
contexts.5 In addition, there is the obvious fact that
even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text,
the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial
for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native
speaker of English reading an article with the headline
"JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going
to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or
"phlebitis".

The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the
China field. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a
group of colleagues and read a randomly-selected passage out loud?
Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many
teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of
conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four
years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through
anything from Confucius to
Lu Xun, pausing only
occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in
their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course,
are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my
fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese
for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered
by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes
me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to
save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a
tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment
I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded
moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has
begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague
would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at
random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library
and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book
was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia
collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough
task -- never mind reading the book in question. This state
of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient
to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but
must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook
examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few
years.

The comparison with learning the usual western languages is
striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to
read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels -- La
nausée by Sartre, Voltaire's
Candide, L'étranger by Camus --
plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It was a
lot of work but fairly painless; all I really needed was a good
dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got at a garage
sale.

This kind of "sink or swim" approach just doesn't work in
Chinese. At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn't
yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard,
impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too
daunting. I couldn't read an article without looking up about
every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the
front page of the People's Daily and not be able to completely
decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested I read
The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice
three-volume edition. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my
shelf like a fat, smug Buddha, only the first twenty or so pages
filled with scribbled definitions and question marks, the rest
crisp and virgin. After six years of studying Chinese, I'm still
not at a level where I can actually read it without an English
translation to consult. (By "read it", I mean, of course, "read it
for pleasure". I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and a
dictionary in my hand, I could get through it.) Simply diving into
the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy,
it can even be counterproductive. As George Kennedy writes, "The
difficulty of memorizing a Chinese ideograph as compared with the
difficulty of learning a new word in a European language, is such
that a rigid economy of mental effort is
imperative."6 This is, if anything, an understatement.
With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better
advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water
before heading toward the deep end.

As if all this weren't bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of
the Chinese writing system is that there are two (mercifully
overlapping) sets of characters: the traditional characters still
used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the simplified characters
adopted by the People's Republic of China in the late 1950's and
early 60's. Any foreign student of Chinese is more or less forced
to become familiar with both sets, since they are routinely
exposed to textbooks and materials from both Chinas. This
linguistic camel's-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on
the already absurdly burdened student of Chinese, who at this
point would gladly trade places with Sisyphus. But since Chinese
people themselves are never equally proficient in both
simplified and complex characters, there is absolutely no shame
whatsoever in eventually concentrating on one set to the partial
exclusion the other. In fact, there is absolutely no shame in
giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it.

2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use
an alphabet.

To further explain why the Chinese writing system is so hard in
this respect, it might be a good idea to spell out (no pun
intended) why that of English is so easy. Imagine the kind of task
faced by the average Chinese adult who decides to study English.
What skills are needed to master the writing system? That's easy:
26 letters. (In upper and lower case, of course, plus script and a
few variant forms. And throw in some quote marks, apostrophes,
dashes, parentheses, etc. -- all things the Chinese use in their
own writing system.) And how are these letters written? From left
to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate
word boundaries. Forgetting for a moment the problem of spelling
and actually making words out of these letters, how long does it
take this Chinese learner of English to master the various
components of the English writing system? Maybe a day or two.

Now consider the American undergraduate who decides to study
Chinese. What does it take for this person to master the Chinese
writing system? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet,
though there are recurring components that make up the characters.
How many such components are there? Don't ask. As with all such
questions about Chinese, the answer is very messy and
unsatisfying. It depends on how you define "component" (strokes?
radicals?), plus a lot of other tedious details. Suffice it to
say, the number is quite large, vastly more than the 26 letters of
the Roman alphabet. And how are these components combined to form
characters? Well, you name it -- components to the left of other
components, to the right of other components, on top of other
components, surrounding other components, inside of other
components -- almost anything is possible. And in the process of
making these spatial accommodations, these components get
flattened, stretched, squashed, shortened, and distorted in order
to fit in the uniform square space that all characters are
supposed to fit into. In other words, the components of Chinese
characters are arrayed in two dimensions, rather than in the neat
one-dimensional rows of alphabetic writing.

Okay, so ignoring for the moment the question of elegance, how
long does it take a Westerner to learn the Chinese writing system
so that when confronted with any new character they at least know
how to move the pen around in order to produce a reasonable
facsimile of that character? Again, hard to say, but I would
estimate that it takes the average learner several months of hard
work to get the basics down. Maybe a year or more if they're a
klutz who was never very good in art class. Meanwhile, their
Chinese counterpart learning English has zoomed ahead to learn
cursive script, with time left over to read Moby Dick, or
at least Strunk & White.

This is not exactly big news, I know; the alphabet really is a
breeze to learn. Chinese people I know who have studied English
for a few years can usually write with a handwriting style that is
almost indistinguishable from that of the average American. Very
few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a
natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but
that of an awkward Chinese third-grader. If there were nothing
else hard about Chinese, the task of learning to write characters
alone would put it in the rogues' gallery of hard-to-learn
languages.

3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.

So much for the physical process of writing the characters
themselves. What about the sheer task of memorizing so many
characters? Again, a comparison of English and Chinese is
instructive. Suppose a Chinese person has just the previous day
learned the English word "president", and now wants to write it
from memory. How to start? Anyone with a year or two of English
experience is going to have a host of clues and spelling
rules-of-thumb, albeit imperfect ones, to help them along. The
word really couldn't start with anything but "pr", and after that
a little guesswork aided by visual memory ("Could a 'z' be in
there? That's an unusual letter, I would have noticed it, I think.
Must be an 's'...") should produce something close to the target.
Not every foreigner (or native speaker for that matter) has noted
or internalized the various flawed spelling heuristics of English,
of course, but they are at least there to be utilized.

Now imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the
previous day encountered the Chinese word for "president"
(总统 zǒngtǒng )
and want to write it. What processes do you go through in
retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget,
with a forgetting that is both absolute and perfect in a way few
things in this life are. You can repeat the word as often as you
like; the sound won't give you a clue as to how the character is
to be written. After you learn a few more characters and get hip
to a few more phonetic components, you can do a bit better.
("Zǒng 总 is a phonetic
component in some other character, right?...Song?
Zeng? Oh yeah, cong总
as in cōngmíng
聪明.") Of course, the phonetic aspect of some
characters is more obvious than that of others, but many
characters, including some of the most high-frequency ones, give
no clue at all as to their pronunciation.

All of this is to say that Chinese is just not very phonetic
when compared to English. (English, in turn, is less phonetic than
a language like German or Spanish, but Chinese isn't even in the
same ballpark.) It is not true, as some people outside the field
tend to think, that Chinese is not phonetic at all, though a
perfectly intelligent beginning student could go several months
without noticing this fact. Just how phonetic the language is a
very complex issue. Educated opinions range from 25% (Zhao
Yuanren)7 to around 66% (DeFrancis),8 though the latter estimate assumes more
knowledge of phonetic components than most learners are likely
to have. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that
sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the
most salient thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect
of the language doesn't really become very useful until you've
learned a few hundred characters, and even when you've learned
two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never
provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic
quality of English does.

Which means that often you just completely forget how to write
a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the
radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the
character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native
language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese
people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary
squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a
foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker
come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters
for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of
vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the
exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I
have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed
Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I
know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to
write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee",
"screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow",
"ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say
"forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke
down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English
speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin
can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"?
I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese
Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong
Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write
a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I
found that I couldn't remember how to write the character
嚔, as in da penti打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I
asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my
surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish
embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the
character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the
"Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in
English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word
"sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in
China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and
remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how
unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up
with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence
between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra"
is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on
"rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a
reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the
most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their
hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some
particularly elusive character.

As one mundane example of the advantages of a phonetic writing
system, here is one kind of linguistic situation I encountered
constantly while I was in France. (Again I use French as my
canonical example of an "easy" foreign language.) I wake up one
morning in Paris and turn on the radio. An ad comes on, and I hear
the word "amortisseur" several times. "What's an
amortisseur?" I think to myself, but as I am in a hurry to
make an appointment, I forget to look the word up in my haste to
leave the apartment. A few hours later I'm walking down the
street, and I read, on a sign, the word "AMORTISSEUR" --
the word I heard earlier this morning. Beneath the word on the
sign is a picture of a shock absorber. Aha! So "amortisseur" means
"shock absorber". And voila! I've learned a new word,
quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when
reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the
radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the
next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can
reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word phonetically --
"a-mor-tis-seur". Before long I can retrieve the word
easily, use it in conversation, or write it in a letter to a
friend. And the process of learning a foreign language begins to
seem less daunting.

When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was
quite different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all
visually interesting but phonetically mute. I carried around a
little dictionary to look up unfamiliar characters in, but it's
almost impossible to look up a character in a Chinese dictionary
while walking along a crowded street (more on dictionary look-up
later), and so I didn't get nearly as much phonetic reinforcement
as I got in France. In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign
advertising shock absorbers and never know how to pronounce any of
the characters unless I first look them up. And even then, the
next time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up
again. And again, and again. The reinforcement does not come
naturally and easily.

4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.

I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about
three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened
to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me.
I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've
never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can
understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane
crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with
some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The
crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There
were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after
take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a
critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency.
The plane had just been serviced three days before and no
mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the
article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never
studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more
easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three
years of studying Chinese.

What was going on here? Why was this "foreign" language so
transparent? The reason was obvious: cognates -- those helpful
words that are just English words with a little foreign
make-up.9 I could read the article because most of
the operative words were basically English: aeropuerto,
problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion
critica, emergencia, etc. Recognizing these words as
just English words in disguise is about as difficult as
noticing that Superman is really Clark Kent without his
glasses. That these quasi-English words are easier to learn
than Chinese characters (which might as well be quasi-Martian)
goes without saying.

Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain
about to go into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor's
office, and, with a minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of
guesswork ("diabetes" is just "diabetes" and "insulin" is
"insulina", it turns out), you're saved. In China you'd be
a goner for sure, unless you happen to have a dictionary with you,
and even then you would probably pass out while frantically
looking for the first character in the word for insulin. Which
brings me to the next reason why Chinese is so hard.

5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is
complicated.

One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning
Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the
dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of
secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they
sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high
schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the
dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball!
Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly
language, but
a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile.

Figuring out all the radicals and their variants, plus dealing
with the ambiguous characters with no obvious radical at all is a
stupid, time-consuming chore that slows the learning process down
by a factor of ten as compared to other languages with a sensible
alphabet or the equivalent. I'd say it took me a good year before
I could reliably find in the dictionary any character I might
encounter. And to this day, I will very occasionally stumble onto
a character that I simply can't find at all, even after ten
minutes of searching. At such times I raise my hands to the sky,
Job-like, and consider going into telemarketing.

Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive
languages on earth. I currently have more than twenty Chinese
dictionaries of various kinds on my desk, and they all have a
specific and distinct use. There are dictionaries with simplified
characters used on the mainland, dictionaries with the traditional
characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and dictionaries with
both. There are dictionaries that use the Wade-Giles romanization,
dictionaries that use pinyin, and dictionaries that use other more
surrealistic romanization methods. There are dictionaries of
classical Chinese particles, dictionaries of Beijing dialect,
dictionaries of chéngyǔ
(four-character idioms), dictionaries of
xiēhòuyǔ (special
allegorical two-part sayings), dictionaries of
yànyǔ (proverbs), dictionaries
of Chinese communist terms, dictionaries of Buddhist terms,
reverse dictionaries... on and on. An exhaustive hunt for some
elusive or problematic lexical item can leave one's desk "strewn
with dictionaries as numerous as dead soldiers on a
battlefield."10

For looking up unfamiliar characters there is another method
called the four-corner system. This method is very fast -- rumored
to be, in principle, about as fast as alphabetic look-up (though I
haven't met anyone yet who can hit the winning number each time on
the first try). Unfortunately, learning this method takes about as
much time and practice as learning the Dewey decimal system. Plus
you are then at the mercy of the few dictionaries that are
arranged according to the numbering scheme of the four-corner
system. Those who have mastered this system usually swear by it.
The rest of us just swear.

Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to
do with the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it's
pretty obvious where the word boundaries lie -- there are spaces
between the words. If you don't know the word in question, it's
usually fairly clear what you should look up. (What actually
constitutes a word is a very subtle issue, of course, but for my
purposes here, what I'm saying is basically correct.) In Chinese
there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of
knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to
tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to
look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:

FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND
BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY
AT THE STALE MATE BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR 'S UNION
BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC
TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A
WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. "THE FIRST A MEND MENT IS
AT IS SUE" HE PRO CLAIM ED. "FOR A CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO
EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST TO
KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S
IS A DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE."

Imagine how this difference would compound the dictionary
look-up difficulties of a non-native speaker of English. The
passage is pretty trivial for us to understand, but then we
already know English. For them it would often be hard to tell
where the word boundaries were supposed to be. So it is, too, with
someone trying to learn Chinese.

6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).

Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or
four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and
Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable
level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken.
There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical
Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least
tenure.

Unfortunately, classical Chinese pops up everywhere, especially
in Chinese paintings and character scrolls, and most people will
assume anyone literate in Chinese can read it. It's truly
embarrassing to be out at a Chinese restaurant, and someone asks
you to translate some characters on a wall hanging.

"Hey, you speak Chinese. What does this scroll say?" You
look up and see that the characters are written in wenyan,
and in incomprehensible "grass-style" calligraphy to boot. It
might as well be an EKG readout of a dying heart patient.

"Uh, I can make out one or two of the characters, but I
couldn't tell you what it says," you stammer. "I think it's about
a phoenix or something."

"Oh, I thought you knew Chinese," says your friend, returning
to their menu. Never mind that an honest-to-goodness Chinese
person would also just scratch their head and shrug; the face that
is lost is yours.

Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical
Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that
sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be
understood only if you already know what the passage says in
the first place. This is because classical Chinese really
consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes
written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a
small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already
knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An
uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such
writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present,
could understand the entries in the "personal" section of the
classified ads that say things like: "Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks
BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or
threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans.
mach., no weirdos please."

In fairness, it should be said that classical Chinese gets
easier the more you attempt it. But then so does hitting a hole in
one, or swimming the English channel in a straitjacket.

7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they
all suck.

Well, perhaps that's too harsh. But it is true that there are
too many of them, and most of them were designed either by
committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of
linguists. It is, of course, a very tricky task to devise a
romanization method; some are better than others, but all involve
plenty of counterintuitive spellings.11 And if you're serious about a career in
Chinese, you'll have to grapple with at least four or five of
them, not including the
bopomofu phonetic
symbols used in Taiwan. There are probably a dozen or more
romanization schemes out there somewhere, most of them
mercifully obscure and rightfully ignored. There is a standing
joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility
in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new
romanization method.

8. Because tonal languages are weird.

Okay, that's very Anglo-centric, I know it. But I have to
mention this problem because it's one of the most common
complaints about learning Chinese, and it's one of the aspects of
the language that westerners are notoriously bad at. Every person
who tackles Chinese at first has a little trouble believing this
aspect of the language. How is it possible that
shùxué means
"mathematics" while shūxuě
means "blood transfusion", or that
guòjiǎng means "you
flatter me" while guǒjiàng
means "fruit paste"?

By itself, this property of Chinese would be hard enough; it
means that, for us non-native speakers, there is this extra,
seemingly irrelevant aspect of the sound of a word that you must
memorize along with the vowels and consonants. But where the real
difficulty comes in is when you start to really use Chinese to
express yourself. You suddenly find yourself straitjacketed --
when you say the sentence with the intonation that feels natural,
the tones come out all wrong. For example, if you wish say
something like "Hey, that's my water glass you're drinking
out of!", and you follow your intonational instincts -- that is,
to put a distinct falling tone on the first character of the word
for "my" -- you will have said a kind of gibberish that may or may
not be understood.

Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and
second-nature. With non-tonal languages you can basically import,
mutatis mutandis, your habitual ways of emphasizing,
negating, stressing, and questioning. The results may be somewhat
non-native but usually understandable. Not so with Chinese, where
your intonational contours must always obey the tonal constraints
of the specific words you've chosen. Chinese speakers, of course,
can express all of the intonational subtleties available in
non-tonal languages -- it's just that they do it in a way that is
somewhat alien to us speakers of non-tonal languages. When you
first begin using your Chinese to talk about subjects that
actually matter to you, you find that it feels somewhat
like trying to have a passionate argument with your hands tied
behind your back -- you are suddenly robbed of some vital
expressive tools you hadn't even been aware of having.

9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have
only recently met.

Language and culture cannot be separated, of course, and one of
the main reasons Chinese is so difficult for Americans is that our
two cultures have been isolated for so long. The reason reading
French sentences like "Le président Bush
assure le peuple koweitien que le gouvernement américain va
continuer à défendre le Koweit contre la menace
irakienne," is about as hard as deciphering pig Latin is not
just because of the deep Indo-European family resemblance, but
also because the core concepts and cultural assumptions in such
utterances stem from the same source. We share the same art
history, the same music history, the same history history
-- which means that in the head of a French person there is
basically the same set of archetypes and the same cultural cast of
characters that's in an American's head. We are as familiar with
Rimbaud as they are with Rambo. In fact, compared to the
difference between China and the U.S., American culture and and
French culture seem about as different as Peter Pan and Skippy
peanut butter.

Speaking with a Chinese person is usually a different matter.
You just can't drop Dickens, Tarzan, Jack the Ripper, Goethe, or
the Beatles into a conversation and always expect to be
understood. I once had a Chinese friend who had read the first
translations of Kafka into Chinese, yet didn't know who Santa
Claus was. China has had extensive contact with the West in the
last few decades, but there is still a vast sea of knowledge and
ideas that is not shared by both cultures.

Similarly, how many Americans other than sinophiles have even a
rough idea of the chronology of China's dynasties? Has the average
history major here ever heard of Qin Shi Huangdi and his
contribution to Chinese culture? How many American music majors
have ever heard a note of Peking Opera, or would recognize a
pipa if they tripped over one? How many otherwise literate
Americans have heard of Lu Xun, Ba Jin, or even Mozi?

What this means is that when Americans and Chinese get
together, there is often not just a language barrier, but an
immense cultural barrier as well. Of course, this is one of the
reasons the study of Chinese is so interesting. It is also one of
the reasons it is so damn hard.

Conclusion

I could go on and on, but I figure if the reader has bothered
to read this far, I'm preaching to the converted, anyway. Those
who have tackled other difficult languages have their own litany
of horror stories, I'm sure. But I still feel reasonably confident
in asserting that, for an average American, Chinese is
significantly harder to learn than any of the other thirty
or so major world languages that are usually studied formally at
the university level (though Japanese in many ways comes close).
Not too interesting for linguists, maybe, but something to
consider if you've decided to better yourself by learning a
foreign language, and you're thinking "Gee, Chinese looks kinda
neat."

It's pretty hard to quantify a process as complex and
multi-faceted as language-learning, but one simple metric is to
simply estimate the time it takes to master the requisite
language-learning skills. When you consider all the
above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire --
ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three
romanization methods, a
grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both
simplified and traditional) -- it adds up to an awful lot of down
time while one is "learning to learn" Chinese.

How much harder is Chinese? Again, I'll use French as my
canonical "easy language". This is a very rough and intuitive
estimate, but I would say that it takes about three times as long
to reach a level of comfortable fluency in speaking, reading, and
writing Chinese as it takes to reach a comparable level in French.
An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in
two Romance languages in the time it would take them to
reach the same level in Chinese.

One could perhaps view learning languages as being similar to
learning musical instruments. Despite the esoteric glories of the
harmonica literature, it's probably safe to say that the piano is
a lot harder and more time-consuming to learn. To extend the
analogy, there is also the fact that we are all virtuosos
on at least one "instrument" (namely, our native language), and
learning instruments from the same family is easier than embarking
on a completely different instrument. A Spanish person learning
Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola,
whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist
trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe
organ.

Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson
in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five
years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along
the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I
have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five
years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you
will have thoroughly learned humility.

There is still the awe-inspiring fact that Chinese people
manage to learn their own language very well. Perhaps they are
like the gradeschool kids that Baroque performance groups recruit
to sing Bach cantatas. The story goes that someone in the
audience, amazed at hearing such youthful cherubs flawlessly
singing Bach's uncompromisingly difficult vocal music, asks the
choir director, "But how are they able to perform such difficult
music?"

"Shh -- not so loud!" says the director, "If you don't tell
them it's difficult, they never know."

Bibliography

(A longer version of this paper is available through
CRCC, Indiana University, 510 N. Fess, Bloomington,
IN, 47408.)

Mair, Victor (1986) "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged
General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of
Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects",
Sino-Platonic Papers,
No. 1, February, 1986 (Dept. of Oriental Studies, University of
Pennsylvania).

Notes

I am speaking of the writing system here, but
the difficulty of the writing system has such a pervasive
effect on literacy and general language mastery that I think
the statement as a whole is still valid. back

Incidentally, I'm aware that much of what I've
said above applies to Japanese as well, but it seems clear
that the burden placed on a learner of Japanese is much
lighter because (a) the number of Chinese characters used in
Japanese is "only" about 2,000 -- fewer by a factor of two
or three compared to the number needed by the average
literate Chinese reader; and (b) the Japanese have phonetic
syllabaries (the hiragana and katakana characters), which
are nearly 100% phonetically reliable and are in many ways
easier to master than chaotic English orthography is.
back

Charles Hockett reminds me that many of my
examples are really instances of loan words, not cognates,
but rather than take up space dealing with the issue, I will
blur the distinction a bit here. There are phonetic loan
words from English into Chinese, of course, but they are
scarce curiosities rather than plentiful semantic moorings.
back

I have noticed from time to time that the
romanization method first used tends to influence one's
accent in Chinese. It seems to me a Chinese person with a
very keen ear could distinguish Americans speaking, say,
Wade-Giles-accented Chinese from pinyin-accented Chinese.
back